Technology

Video: Axon Cam Captures Burning Truck Rescue

Three officers from a Cleveland-area police department rescued the driver of a truck who struck a utility pole Saturday morning.

Euclid (Ohio) Police Officer Adam Beese was wearing a TASER Axon on-officer camera system during the incident, which began at about 11 a.m. As Officer Beese approached the truck, flames from the engine compartment licked the crunched hood of the burgundy pickup.

The raw footage, posted by WKYC, shows the passenger-side window shatter and a cloud of brownish-gray smoke pour from the driver's compartment. Two other officers used batons to break out other windows and pull the man to safety.

Officer Beese is testing the Axon system and helping draft a policy for the agency's Standard Operating Policy manual. Several other officers are evaluating Vievu on-lapel cameras.

Officer Beese mounts his TASER Axon camera to a pair of Oakley Flak Jacket sunglasses and wears a small battery pack/control box on his duty belt. Video can be uploaded to Evidence.com or locally stored, Beese told POLICE Magazine. The department is now evaluating TASER's cloud-based storage service.

"It's your friend," Beese said about the system. "It's there to assist in convictions and reduce false complaints."

Several veteran commanders have resisted its use in the agency, and Beese said he has had to change the status-quo mentality.

"You've got to get the mentality that 'I'm already on video,' because everybody on the street has a video camera, so you might as well have video that's as close to what you're seeing as possible," he said.

I've been in law enforcement for nearly three decades, and early on I realized that good enough is never good enough. Whether it's the vehicle you drive, the reports you write, or the equipment you use, striving for the best almost always brings about the optimal outcome. For me, that philosophy carries through to everything I do and everything I use...

"Drone technology will give our cops and their incident commanders an opportunity to see what they're getting into before they go into harm's way," NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan said Tuesday. "This can now get us a lot closer into areas that a helicopter wouldn't be able to get into.”